The Same Place (The Lamb and the Lion #2) - Gregory Ashe Page 0,121
out. That was good. Tean needed to learn how to eat like that. He knew Ammon liked him thin, but there was such a thing as too thin, and Tean was straddling the line. Yes, he thought as he poured the uneaten cereal down the disposal. Yes, steel-cut oats and fresh fruit and protein shakes. No Cookie Crisp. No Lucky Charms. No McDonald’s.
When he got to work, he had to face the fact that he’d been letting things slide. He looked at Miguel’s reports on the coyote population along the Wasatch Back, including Heber, and made a plan to have a conversation with Miguel. The canine distemper outbreak was serious, and Tean thought he could get a warrant to look for evidence of coyote packs suffering from canine distemper on John Sievers’s land. It would also be a chance to look for the black bear that Sievers purportedly kept. Maybe Jem and Tean could search one part of the property while Miguel—
No, Tean thought, tapping out the email slowly. Of course not. Not like that, anyway.
He looked at a report from the Bureau of Land Management on wild horse populations in the state. The federal agency oversaw huge swaths of Utah, and a ranger had reported several tourists being injured when they got too close to a mustang. Now a BLM bureaucrat wanted to know what the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources was going to do about it. Tean decided to pretend to ignore the bureaucratic side of the problem and, instead, think about some realistic solutions. Better educational programs, maybe. Was it possible to teach a federal bureaucrat how to pull his head out of his butt? That sounded like it needed some serious funding.
The next email took up the rest of his morning: a poultry farm along the Idaho border had reported an outbreak of Virulent Newcastle Disease, which spread like wildfire and could quickly get into wildlife populations. Tean had to coordinate with inspectors, Department of Agriculture and Food officials, the farm’s owners, and, of course, his own conservation officers.
By the time he’d gotten things in motion, his head was hurting pretty bad and he felt spacey. He wasn’t sure when he’d eaten last—possibly McDonald’s with Jem, the day before, but that felt like another lifetime—and he realized he probably needed food. He passed Hannah’s office, which was still dark. He had the brief thought that he might dig through her files and find something that would give him new insight into the case, but of course, the police had already searched everything, and he couldn’t imagine what he might find.
He drove to Rancherito’s, ordered a breakfast burrito in the drive-thru, and ate it in the parking lot. He had his window down, and the air smelled clean, the seared meat fragrance drifting over from the restaurant, a hint of the asphalt warming in the sun. He kept turning the puzzle around in his mind. Brigitte Berger Fitzpatrick. Tean’s initial thought had been that she was Jem’s mother, but now he could imagine other possibilities: a sister that Jem hadn’t known about—or hadn’t told Tean about—or an aunt, a cousin, a grandmother.
I did you a favor, Jem had said. You’re too goddamn stupid to look out for yourself.
There was a perverse kind of logic there. Jem had a narrow but fierce protective streak. It had originally only included Benny, his foster brother. When Benny had died, that protectiveness had transferred to Tean. Tean had noticed it in a million ways: Jem checking to see if he was eating, Jem calling if Tean had to travel for work, Jem pacing around the apartment and muttering about security. Tean had found it mostly gratifying and only occasionally annoying. He could see how Jem might have thought he was protecting Tean by destroying the note, although Tean didn’t like to follow that train of thought, didn’t like to consider why Jem might think Ammon was dangerous or why Tean could, at the edge of consciousness, understand that assessment.
What held Tean’s attention, though, was that Jem must have known at some level that he’d be caught. And that hadn’t mattered. What had mattered was keeping someone safe. Tean didn’t like what Jem had done, and he didn’t approve of it or condone it. But he was starting to understand it. And while Jem undoubtedly acted out of a mix of motives, not all of them pure, the bottom line was that he had done something stupid, knowing he would pay for